Modern British intellectual history has been a particularly flourishing field of
enquiry in recent years, and these two tightly integrated volumes contain major
new essays by almost all of its leading proponents. The contributors examine the
history of British ideas over the past two centuries from a number of
perspectives that together constitute a major new overview of the subject.
History, Religion, and Culture begins with eighteenth-century historiography,
especially Gibbon's Decline and Fall. It takes up different aspects of the place
of religion in nineteenth-century cultural and political life, such as attitudes
towards the native religions of India, the Victorian perception of Oliver
Cromwell, and the religious sensibility